As an austinite I'm nervous about these things. My son and his classmates play along the street and I'm 90% sure I saw one of these driving by our house last week, presumably for testing. The street is legally at a higher speed than most people will drive because there's a lot of activity and no sidewalks which I'm about to argue for changing. Normal people will slow when they see kids around but autonomous cars still drive their normal speed.
>> There are no out of work olive farmers in the US.
I'm not sure this is true. I buy olive oil specifically from California. It's niche but could be larger if they weren't competing with lower overseas labor costs.
Not 50 times larger which is what it would need to be to supply the current domestic consumption. California only produced 1.94 million gallons of olive oil in 2023, that same year the US used ~98.5 million gallons of olive oil.
Even if we could snap our fingers and create the orchards out of thin air there's not enough land and water to grow 50x our current production. Then where's the worker population coming from? They're also trying to drive overall immigration to essentially zero.
It's surprising to me that the prosecutor is allowed to essentially insinuate crimes to influence the jury, without the need to prove them. That seems to undermine the process because it creates a "there's smoke so there must be fire" mentality for the jury.
There was plenty of evidence that he ordered the hits, and the defense had the opportunity to address the evidence in court. The chat logs go far beyond "insinuation"
It's ridiculous that people are pretending there is any doubt about his guilt because they like crypto and/or drugs.
Do you not think the optics are a bit weird when you sentence someone to life for something relatively small, but the reason is another crime you’re very sure he did but you didn’t bother to charge him with?
Prosecutors often choose not to pursue additional charges against someone already serving a life sentence. This approach helps avoid wasting court time and resources on cases that are unlikely to change the individual’s circumstances or contribute meaningfully to justice (none of the murders for hire resulted in victims).
I actually wonder if those charges may still be on the table now that a pardon has been granted.
If I understand correctly, only one of the "murder-for-hire" allegations was dismissed with prejudice[0]. However, he was suspected of orchestrating a total of six "murder-for-hire" plots.
Comically (horrifically sadly?) they were dismissed that way because he was already in prison for life with no possibility of getting out, so the court did not want to waste time on it.
Being a drug kingpin is not considered "something relatively small" under US law, as you can see from the sentencing. Being the leader of a large drug operation and ordering hits to protect your business would be considered worse than trying to take out a hit for whatever "personal reasons".
Obviously the hits are a lot messier to prosecute as well with the misconduct of the FBI agents, maybe you could hammer that enough to confuse a jury. But people are commenting like the evidence outright didn't exist - I can only think they have either heard it told second-hand, or are employing motivated reasoning.
Of course it is. Throwing in potential evidence of unrelated crimes to sway other people's (specifically jury's) opinion about the defendant without formally charging him is exactly what the word "insinuation" means[0]:
the action of suggesting, without being direct, that something unpleasant is true
> There was plenty of evidence that he ordered the hits, and the defense had the opportunity to address the evidence in court
Clearly not that much evidence if the state didn't bother to prosecute those charges. And why would they? The judge sentenced him as though he had been found guilty of them.
Coincidentally, on the same day, SCOTUS confirmed in Andrew v. White ruling [1] that admitting prejudicial evidence violates due process rights under the 14th Amendment.
It's a next token predictor capable of some impressive stuff, but there's no intelligence behind it. You will never find a novel idea from an LLM.
Like so many successful applications of computers it's a new way of taking a monotonous task and grinding through it quickly. In this way I think it's different from some previous fads (e.g. block chain) and there is real utility.
I agree though that it's exhausting to read people anthropomorphize and hype it up.
> I think people seriously overestimate the difference engineer quality makes. Most products can be built with mediocre talent. I'm sorry, that's the truth. We all love to have strong opinions on who we should hire and I say "almost anyone, just throw meat at the problem". Most problems are solved with time and not cleverness.
I'm surprised that your experience here is so different from mine. The best engineers I've had are capable of things that the average to below average ones could likely have never achieved, even with an order of magnitude more time.
I don't think it comes down to cleverness as it does inventiveness. There are dots that great engineers can connect that often nobody else could spot. They also need less process, and a large number of people with all of the coordination overhead does not linearly scale.
Am I the only one who loves writing C++? I've used some newer languages like Kotlin, and that's good too, but I always come back to C++. I think a lot of the criticism is from the old way it was written, before C++11/17.
C++ is a lot of fun, and there exist many compelling subsets, but the language as a whole is a minefield that you need years of experience to navigate, and probably can never master.
> the vast vast majority of c++ is just simple procedural code.
Probably because where C++ is needlessly complex, C is beautifully simple.
I've used both C and C++ in my career, spending 10+ years as a C programmer (kernels, applications and embedded stuff), as well as 4-5 years as a C++ programmer in a financial institution.
I find the thing most "new C/C++ programmers" complain about is memory management and type safety, but honestly, once you have a few years worth of experience, memory management is almost second nature. Most of the time i write the free() statement at the same time as i write the malloc() statement (if applicable).
One of the things I loved about Python when I learnt it was how it dealt with `public`\`private`\protected``. It was "we're all responsible adults. No need to hide anything. We'll just use a naming convention for members that we don't expect people to directly use."
"Enforce encapsulation" suddenly became. "Respect encapsulation" in my head and a bunch of Java/C++ problems evaporated.
I do love that about Python. The encapsulation is there but you can work around it if you’re willing to take responsibility for breaking the gentlemen’s agreement. That’s a lovely pattern.
This gets more and more horrible the larger the code base grows and the more developers get involved.
My current preference is to have everything public, but immutable.
Edit: except for functions. Private functions are a great way of keeping downstream users from touching them. Only expose what you are willing to support.
My experience has been otherwise. There’s almost never a reason to be playing with something like db_connection._socket, but in that one place in your codebase you really really need to, it’s a lifesaver to have access to it.
Linters should be shouting about it and in the PR you’d need to explain why you turned off the warnings to do it anyway, with comments explaining why there was no other feasible option and this was the least bad choice.
BTW, I rarely write _methods and almost never __protected attributes. _something just means “it’s here but you really shouldn’t be playing with it.” I don’t see an advantage to using __anything.
Tooling is a pain, packages are a pain, compiles are slow, the language is inconsistent, header files why..., the list goes on and on and its not outdated complaints.
I love C++, it was my next language after Turbo Pascal, there was a small stint with C, but already in 1992 it felt outdated.
However, during the last decade C++ culture suffered, probably it has taken too many C refugees.
What you call old way, it is still how many folks write C++ in big corporations, I tend to complain that I only see Modern C++ in conference slides, and my own hobby coding.
I love it too, it tends to bend to my will, for better or worse. It feels like it doesn't stand in my way, and that further translates to feeling like there is nothing between my program and the hardware it runs on.
No need to school me on how that isn't true, I'm just describing my feeling and why I love C++.
Moderating content is explicitly protected by the text of Section 230(c)(2)(a):
"(2)Civil liability
No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be held liable on account of—
(A)any action voluntarily taken in good faith to restrict access to or availability of material that the provider or user considers to be obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable, whether or not such material is constitutionally protected; or"
Algorithmic ranking, curation, and promotion are not.
The text of the Third Circuit decision explicitly distinguishes between algorithms that respond to user input -- such as by surfacing content that was previously searched for, or favorited, or followed. Allowing users to filter content by time, upvotes, number of replies etc would be fine.
The FYP algorithm that's contested in the case surfaced the video to the minor without her searching for that topic, following any specific content creator, or positively interacting (liking/favoriting/upvoting) with previous instances of said content. It was fed to her based on a combination of what TikTok knew about her demographic information, what was trending on the platform, and TikTok's editorial secret sauce. TikTok's algorithm made an active decision to surface this content to her, despite knowing that other children had died from similar challenge videos, they promoted it and should be liable for that promotion.
